After the EU referendum result, says Tez Ilyas, conversations about race and identity need to take place. Hence his current show, Made in Britain, which stakes a light-hearted but trenchant claim for the Britishness of his “BNP” – British National Pakistani – life so far. Ilyas is a cheeky chappie from Blackburn, more Opportunity Knocks than op-ed, and his show can easily be enjoyed as perky comedy. But he doesn’t soft-soap his indignation that some would consider him, and people like him, insufficiently British – and his show makes a persuasive counter-argument, thanks in part to its peaceable good humour in the face of such provocation.
A balance is adroitly struck from the off between ingratiating himself and playing up his supposed difference. The opening routine, about the N-word, defuses tension by asserting his own, very British angst about political correctness, then follows up with some larky dancing to south Asian music. A later neat joke finds him struggling to remember the approved current terminology for white people; another – finding common cause with his likely audience, then instantly “othering” himself – tells us that: “Personally, I voted to remain in the European caliphate.”
It’s quite deftly done, this bait-and-switch technique, and keeps us ticklishly on our toes. And the pattern repeats elsewhere, as Ilyas broaches one subject after another on which a British Muslim might be assumed to have a particular take – Isis, Charlie Hebdo – before mocking that assumption in a series of rug-pulling punchlines. The point is, Ilyas’s separation from mainstream Britishness is an illusion. When he narrates a Blur-alike section, entitled Pak Life, about his Lancashire youth, it’s more familiar than exotic. His dad’s favourite comedian was Bernard Manning. On his pilgrimage to Mecca (one word summary: “Squishy”), he frets about whether queuing protocol is being correctly observed.
Of course, this material occasionally trades on cliches of Britishness as crude as the Muslim stereotypes he mocks. And there are a few occasions when the gags are built on flimsy foundations. The demand that characters in The Jungle Book should speak with Indian accents is provocative but tenuous; the claim that Britain peaked in summer 2012 requires a very tight focus around the Olympics to sustain. At other points, Ilyas is entertaining but conventional, as with routines about his parents wishing he was a doctor, or with a closing audience participation set-piece that turns his arranged (and failed) marriage into a gameshow.
But he’s never less than good fun, and that latter skit is electrified tonight by a foot-in-mouth intervention by Ilyas’s American audience volunteer, who tells our British-Pakistani host that in the US, he’d likely get described as – dread word! – Indian. Ilyas ladles on the mock-horror, and why not – because the contingency and flexibility of such fiercely contested loyalties (to our class, our religion, our national or transnational identities) is what Made in Britain is all about. It’s a jaunty and deceptively eloquent show, sharply focused on what unites rather than divides us.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 25 March. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
